A Stitch in Time

by Penelope Lively

  “They eat with their fingers, the Lucases.”

  “I daresay they do.” Maria wished she were back in the kitchen, having that conversation with her mother.

  By the time they reached the start of the cliff path several children were missing. There was a long stop while they were rounded up. Mr Foster sat on a stile and stared out to sea in silence. Finally, with the party reassembled they set off once more, along the narrow woodland path that meant they must walk in single file. The Lucas children, pushing and shoving each other, rushed off at a gallop, all trying to be first. Mr Foster, abandoning all attempts at leadership, placed himself last of all, presumably to gather up the lost or injured. The various sections of the party soon became separated, though clearly audible to each other as their voices came through the trees. Maria, hanging back from the rest of the children, could hear their progress marked by the woodpigeons that erupted from the branches as they approached, and the occasional shriek of a jay.

  They went on and on. They passed the point at which the Fosters had turned back on that Saturday afternoon walk with Aunt Ruth and Uncle David. Maria, plodding onward, could imagine her mother’s misgivings, and felt a flicker of sympathy. Mostly, though, she was buried in her own thoughts and feelings. They had reached a part of the woods where the trees were of the most immense size, towering above her to such heights that, straining her neck to look up at them, they seemed to crowd out the sky altogether. She felt even smaller than usual. Putting her hand on the trunk of a huge beech, as far up as she could, she was covering only a minute fraction of its height; far above her, the leaves shivered and rustled indifferently. They must be very old trees, these. Hundreds of years old, indeed. Perhaps Harriet had walked underneath them and had the same feelings of smallness and insignificance. Perhaps she too had felt dizzy as she looked upwards at those shifting branches, had wished herself somewhere more open, less silent and oppressive.

  The silence, though, was partly her own creation, removed into her own thoughts. For, coming round a corner, she caught up suddenly with the other children, engaged in ferocious discussion that rang through the trees.

  “It’s down here.”

  “No, it isn’t. You don’t know anything. It’s further.”

  “It’s here. I remember that tree.”

  “There was a sort of path…”

  “Shut up, you lot,” said Martin authoritatively. “It’s there. We’ll have to wait for the others. Mum…!”

  Gradually, they all regathered. Maria observed with amazement that her father was now carrying a small child (she never could remember all their names). He looked exhausted and his hair was much disarranged on one side where the baby was strap-hanging from it.

  “Down there?” said Mrs Foster in alarm.

  The path, at this point, followed what must really be a ledge along steeply shelving cliffs. To one side, the ground reared upwards to where, above and through the trees, the final rocky summit of the cliff could be seen, golden-brown, capped with turf and bushes. And to the other it dropped away down to some invisible point where the sea could be heard washing to and fro on the shingle. But, thick with trees and undergrowth as this place was, it seemed not so much cliff as woodland that had somehow got tipped on one side. It was only looking downwards, at the thin track plunging away through bushes, that you realised how steep it was.

  “I wonder if perhaps…” began Mrs Foster.

  But nobody paid any attention to what she might have had to say. The Lucas children were explaining that there was a proper beach at the bottom and nobody ever went there so you had it all to yourself. (“So I should imagine,” said Mr Foster drily.) And, they insisted, it wasn’t half as steep as it looked, and all started plunging one after another down this precipitous path (that barely seemed certain if it was indeed a path) while behind the mothers shouted, “Be careful! Not so fast!” and somewhere a long way below the sea pushed and pulled uncaringly on the pebbles.

  They descended, one after another, each intent upon his or her own self-preservation. Except, of course, for the mothers, who each felt burdened with a great many safeties, according to the fate of mothers, and were in states of anxieties which varied according to their personalities – in other words, noisily but only mildly concerned in the case of the Lucas mothers, silent and in a near-frenzy in the case of Mrs Foster. Maria put one foot slowly and carefully in front of the other, steadying herself with a hand on a sapling or jutting rock where possible. Once she skidded on some treacherous shale that slithered under her shoes, so that she sat down hard, bruising herself. It could have been worse. Below and out of sight, hair-raising cries from the other children suggested fatal accidents of one kind or another. Mr Foster, still encumbered with the baby, came down with deliberate care and slowness, beyond doing anything except (presumably) hope for the best.

  At last they were all down and there, as promised, was a beach. Though not, at first sight, a beach very much different from any other except that, also as promised, there was no one else in sight. Otherwise, it seemed a long and arduous way to have come for a minor change of scenery. Maria, looking at her mother, could feel her thinking this.

  Instantly, there was a great deal to be done. Driftwood had to be collected for a fire. A hearth had to be built from stones, with wind-break. The fire had to be built, and kept stoked. Cooking had to be started. It all took a great deal of time and argument among the Lucases. Mrs Foster, who was used to eating at one o’clock sharp, watched discontentedly as the hands of her watch crept past two. Maria wandered about, collecting anything that would burn from the line of seaweed and rubbish that wavered along the shingle. The others were all squabbling – though no more so, perhaps, than usual – over who should do what and eat what. The mothers made decisions and cooked. Mr Foster stood around, trying to stop children from getting too near the fire. Maria felt very detached from everyone else: she had hardly spoken to anyone for hours, and no one seemed to miss her, except Martin, who said kindly, once, “Are you feeling sick or something?” She shook her head and pretended to be much involved with breaking up a decaying wooden box.

  The fact was that she did feel rather peculiar. Not exactly ill, but all on edge. Her legs were shaky (though this might perhaps be accounted for by the long walk, followed by the steep descent). Continuing to dismantle the box, so that she should be left alone and not chivvied to help in some way, she sat with her back to the sea – that fretful grey surface somehow made her feel even more uneasy – and looked at the cliffside down which they had come. But that, mantled in swaying trees, was as unsteady as the sea. Only here and there did it seem solid, where areas of bared rock and soil showed, uncovered yet by greenery. Most of the greenery, as she now knew, was old, ancient… Immense trees. Roots like serpents jutting from the ground. Ferns. Jungly plants. Everything grows and grows, she thought, everywhere, all the time, leaves and stalks and flowers and seeds… Anything could be happening – people getting born and dying and being happy or not happy – but they don’t care, they just go on growing and growing. And, thinking this, the shouts of the other children, the pop-pop of a motor-boat somewhere out to sea, the whimper of Martin’s baby sister, seemed drowned by a deafening imaginary sound of vegetable pods cracking open. The beach and the sea and the cliff became a mindless place of rock and plant and tree and the ceaselessly foraging gulls. It could have been any time; thousands of years ago, or yesterday. Or about 1865.

  “Maria…! Don’t you want something to eat?”

  She joined the circle round the fire, but she was a part of it in person only. She ate a sausage in her fingers, and heard them talking, and saw the fire’s hot and treacherous bed of black ash. And above the fire to a height of a couple of feet there hung and shimmered a haze of heat with the silken look of water, that distorted slightly whatever was beyond it so that Charlotte’s round pink face, blissfully munching at her chop, quivered and became blurred. And presently it was not Charlotte’s face at all, but Harriet’s fac
e, and Maria sat and stared at it, and thought, and wondered, and became further and further removed from the picnic.

  She came out of this trance, finally, to find everyone busy clearing things away. Mr Foster had removed himself a short distance and was staring at the sea. The children were setting out an elaborate game with pebbles and piles of seaweed. All, that is, except Martin.

  “Where’s Martin?” said Maria.

  At first nobody paid any attention. Then his mother said vaguely, “Yes, where has Martin got to?”

  Charlotte said, “He went off by himself. He was in a mood.”

  “Oh, well…” said Mrs Lucas. She turned over on to her stomach and opened a book.

  Maria began to search the beach. First by just looking, and then by getting up and running around it in what, even in the process of doing so, she realised to be a panic-stricken and silly manner. Getting out of breath would not help. Her heart thumped and banged. It did not take long to establish that Martin was not on the beach. It was a small beach, ending at one side in some rocks and fading away at the other into the scrub-covered foot of a rather nasty-looking cliff.

  “He isn’t anywhere…”

  Mrs Lucas rolled over and sat up. “No,” she said, “he isn’t, is he?”

  “Trust our Martin” said the other Mrs Lucas, with a sigh. Though both looked, now faintly disturbed, but not very.

  “Well,” said Mr Foster, joining them, “I suppose we must be thinking of the homeward journey.”

  Mrs Foster began to pack their things firmly.

  Maria said, in a voice on the edge of something – tears or fury or what, one could not say – that made everyone look at her, “Martin’s disappeared. He’s gone.”

  “Martin…” yelled his mother. She too started to collect possessions.

  “The tide’s coming in,” said Charlotte. “P’raps Martin went round past those rocks. There isn’t any beach there when the tide’s high.”

  “Don’t be such an alarmist,” said her mother. “Shut up and help get those cups. Martin…”

  Maria turned her back on the sea, because tide or no tide, rocks or no rocks, that was not where he would be, she somehow knew. She looked at the cliff, that bare, abrupt cliff to the left, too steep for anything to grow, crumbling, it seemed, even as you looked. And that was where, if anywhere in this place, would be fossils. Dapedius and belemnites and the black teeth of sharks.

  “He’s up there!” she cried, nearly hysterical, “I know he is!”

  Everybody looked. “Oh, heavens!” said Mrs Lucas, “I hope not.”

  “Maria,” said her father, “what is the matter with you? How do you know? Did you see him go up there?”

  Maria could only shake her head and mumble. She was shivering all over. Now they were all looking at her, not at the cliff.

  “What is the matter with you, dear?” said her mother. “He’s probably just gone on ahead, hasn’t he?”

  “No!” said Maria, frantic. “He’s up there, on the cliff. They all are. Can’t you hear the dog barking?” And it seemed unbelievable that they could not, but all stood round her in that stupid way, doing nothing, while up there, somewhere in the bushes, the poor thing was working itself into a frenzy, and now, as she listened, she could hear that heaving, shifting noise again, and above it, surely, a child’s voice shouting.

  “Harriet!” she said, but only in a whisper now. “Oh, poor Harriet…” And as she looked at the cliff, seemingly more clothed in trees and scrub now than a few moments ago, the whole thing trembled and shook and then, most horribly, before her very eyes, slid downwards. And the noise that that little dog was making stopped abruptly.

  She put her hands in front of her eyes and burst into tears.

  Everybody was talking at once, and making comforting noises. Through them she heard her mother (“… terribly strung up lately, for some reason. I thought it would all end in tears.”) and Charlotte (“She can have my cake for tea, actually”) and then someone else (“Here’s Martin. Where have you been, for heaven’s sake?”).

  “There now,” said Mr Foster, intensely embarrassed. “Pull yourself together, Maria. Martin’s perfectly all right.”

  And Maria, taking her hand from her eyes and tear-streaked face, burst out in anguish, “I know he’s all right. It wasn’t him, it was Harriet. The cliff slipped down and Harriet was killed.”

  Somebody said, “But the cliff hasn’t slipped, Maria. Nothing happened at all.”

  “Not now,” she wailed. “Not now, not today. Then, back then, when Harriet was here. Oh, this is a beastly place, I hate it, it doesn’t care. I want to go home.” And she began to run, stumbling, towards the path.

  Chapter Eleven

  A SMALL BLACK DOG AND ONE FINAL PIECE OF BLUE LIAS

  “I TRUST YOU enjoyed the picnic,” said Mrs Shand.

  “No,” said Maria, “I didn’t very much.”

  It was evening. There had been the return from the picnic, of which Maria had hardly been aware, and then there had been goodbyes and sortings-out of possessions, and then Maria had gone up to her room. Her parents were treating her in a gingerly fashion, with sympathy rather than irritation, as though she were mildly ill. Her mother said she thought an early night would be a good idea. Her father clearly wished to forget the whole day as soon as possible and had set about packing up for the return to London, with deliberate briskness. Maria sat on the edge of her bed for about ten minutes, and then went downstairs again.

  “I thought I’d say goodbye to the landlady.”

  “Yes” said Mrs Foster in surprise. “Yes, that would be a nice idea.”

  And so there she was sitting once again on Mrs Shand’s rose-covered chintz sofa, surrounded by the ticking of the clocks, urgent or ponderous according to their temperament, and looking again, and even more intently, at the sampler.

  “Have you got hay-fever?” said Mrs Shand.

  “No,” said Maria. And then, with a further burst of honesty, “I’ve been crying.”

  “How very foolish,” said Mrs Shand. “Have a chocolate.”

  “I don’t really like chocolates, actually.”

  Mrs Shand peered at her embroidery, and made a tutting noise. She began to unpick something with a pair of scissors. “And why were you crying, may I ask?”

  There was a pause. Mrs Shand unpicked the blue silk stitches and Maria stared first at her and then at the sampler. At last she said, “We went for a picnic at that place along the coast where there’s been landslips. I didn’t like it. It’s a horrid place. That’s where Harriet was killed, isn’t it?” Her eyes filled with tears.

  Mrs Shand put down her scissors. She tweaked some loose threads out of the canvas and said, “What an extraordinary idea. Of course she wasn’t.”

  The tears plopped on to the knees of Maria’s jeans. “What?” she said.

  Mrs Shand finished inside her sleeve and produced a white handkerchief initialled H.S. in one corner. “You had better borrow this. Of course Harriet wasn’t killed. Whatever put such an idea into your head?”

  Maria scrubbed at her eyes. Her rather grand feelings of tragedy and grief were reduced suddenly to foolishness. And surprise.

  “There are no pictures of her. Older, or grown-up.”

  “Yes, there are,” said Mrs Shand. She pointed to a photograph in a silver frame standing on the desk.

  “I never noticed that one,” said Maria. She looked at it. It showed a woman of around her mother’s age and a girl of about ten or eleven. The woman wore a long skirt, clamped round her middle with a wide belt, and a blouse with a high tight neck and long sleeves. Her hair was piled up on top of her head like a bun. She had a wide, cheerful smile and was holding a basket of apples or something which she would appear just to have picked. The girl was also carrying a basket, and had a rather stern expression. She wore a sunbonnet.

  “We were in Devon,” said Mrs Shand, “some family holiday. Aunts and cousins and everyone. We were always a very tribal family.
”

  Maria gazed at the picture. “The girl is you?”

  “The girl is me.”

  “And the grown-up person is… Harriet?”

  “My aunt Harriet. Mrs Stanton. She never had any daughters of her own, only boys, so I was by way of being something of a favourite. She was,” Mrs Shand went on, with an odd note in her voice, “a particularly nice aunt.” She picked up her sewing again.

  “And then there was the sampler being finished by Susan. Harriet’s sampler.

  “That was an act of charity. My aunt hated sewing and my mother was rather good at it. I do not know, frankly, why Aunt Harriet was allowed to get away with that, but somehow she was.”

  “But there weren’t any more photographs of her in the album. With Susan and the others.”

  “She was sent to boarding-school, being considered in need of discipline. And then she married young and was out in India for a considerable time. It is just chance, that there are no more pictures.”

  ‘I see,” said Maria.

  But, she thought, and could not bring herself to say it, there is also the matter of the swing. I somehow knew there was a swing even before I saw it on the sampler, and I kept hearing this little dog barking. Or, she said to herself sternly, I kept imagining I heard this dog barking.

  “Of course,” said Mrs Shand, “there was a landslip. When Aunt Harriet was around your age. You are perfectly correct about that. And there was a minor tragedy. A sad little accident. I mentioned it to you this morning, I think, as you were about to set off.”